Rock
David Bowie Coin Sent Into Space
A little piece of the Starman was lifted into the heavens this week, when the U.K.’s Royal Mint went orbital with a special coin of the late, great David Bowie. Earlier, the Mint pressed and released the collectibles which celebrate different stages in Bowie’s career, with each featuring the lightning bolt motif from the Aladdin Sane era. There are several versions including limited edition gold coins, with prices ranging from £13 ($17) to £2,425 ($3,245), a “fitting tribute to the career of one of British music’s most enduring icons,” a statement from the Royal Mint reads. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the proces...
10 Best Bob Dylan Covers Albums
Odetta, Odetta Sings Dylan (1965)Dylan has credited Odetta with turning him on to folk music – he has said he heard her album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues and “went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar.” Here, on one of the first albums of Dylan covers, she makes some of his early political songs sound like they’re old folk tunes and brings a frank earthiness to “Baby, I’m In the Mood for You.” It sounds like this version influenced Miley Cyrus’ 2017 performance of the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Really. The Hollies, Words and Music By Bob Dylan (1969)When Graham Nash left the Hollies to join Crosby, Stills & Nash, his former band recorded what he regarded as a relatively tame album of D...
The Year in Live Streams 2020: StageIt Helps Artists Connect and Monetize
StageIt was founded in 2009 as a livestream platform but has seen a, wait for it, unprecedented surge in activity since March. A leader in providing a platform for artists to host ticketed livestreams, they helped acts monetize live performances (both in ticket sales and tips during broadcasts) when the most lucrative piece of artists’ business was on pause. Perhaps the most successful artist on the platform was Blue October. The Texan rock band played a series of livestreams centered around different albums from their discography and collectively grossed more than $506,000 across 10 streams. This achievement is, in part, due to the group’s engagement with fans, walking a thin line between selling tickets on the platform in order to earn a living and respecting the delicate financial polit...
Dance Gavin Dance Announce Livestream Concert Featuring Fan-Voted Setlist
Dance Gavin Dance has announced a global streaming event, Tree City Sessions Volume 2, slated for broadcast at 7 p.m. ET on Dec. 19. The virtual event will feature the quintet performing a fan-voted setlist including tracks that have never been performed live before. Produced by Danny Wimmer Presents, the band will play from their hometown at the Sacramento Tower Bridge in California. The bridge will be shut down for the concert as the group performs in the round with full production. “We are poised to step up to the challenge of playing a fully fan-voted set, and it is an honor to be able to shut down traffic in the middle of the city to do it,” said Dance Gavin Dance singer Tilian Pearson in a release. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. ...
Brian “Head” Welch on Living With Depression, Addiction, and Self-Hatred
Listen via Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts | Radio Public | RSS Presented by Consequence of Sound and Sound Mind Live, Going There with Dr. Mike is a new interview podcast series in which clinical psychologist and life coach Dr. Mike Friedman talks with musicians about the crossroads where music and mental health meet. Brian “Head” Welch joins the show this week to discuss his struggle with mental illness. The Korn guitarist shares how a history of bullying resulted in extreme self-hatred and isolation that stayed with him throughout much of his early life. As time went on, this self-hatred contributed to an ongoing struggle with depression, which he describes as a “darkness.” The Love and Death founding member also explains that, as a child, mus...
Universal Music Publishing Buys Bob Dylan’s Song Catalog
Another factor, industry sources say, is that the generation of singer-songwriters who came of age in the sixties and seventies is at a point where they’re thinking about their legacies, as well as estate planning. On December 4, Primary Wave Music Publishing announced that it had acquired a majority stake in the catalog of singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, in a deal that The Wall Street Journal reported valued her compositions at $100 million. That deal and Dylan’s could trigger more big catalog transactions. This is a unique prize, however. Among the songwriters of the rock era, only the Beatles are as influential as Dylan, the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The catalog includes more than 600 compositions, written over the course of six decades, including “Blo...
Paul Stanley on Kiss’ Record-Breaking New Year’s Eve Show
Kyle Meredith With… Kiss Listen via Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | Radio Public | RSS Kiss legend Paul Stanley and Landmarks Live creator Dan Catullo sit down with Kyle Meredith to discuss the band’s upcoming New Year’s Eve show, which is said to be their biggest show ever. Catullo tells us of safely producing a show of this magnitude during a pandemic and doing it live from Dubi to a virtual audience around the world. Meanwhile, Stanley details the importance of bringing people together and how he makes a show that people will watch online compelling for them at home. The frontman also speaks about his unstoppable positive outlook, an update on the debut record from his side band Soul Station, impressing Rod...
Iggy Pop Shares French Language Cover of Elvis Costello’s “No Flag”: Stream
Back in October, Elvis Costello released his 31st album Hey Clockface, which included a song called “No Flag” that was partly inspired by Iggy Pop. Today, Pop has returned the favor by releasing a cover of the tune that’s sung almost entirely in French. In a Rolling Stone conversation between the two rock legends, Costello expressed his surprise that nobody picked up on “No Flag” being a nod to Pop’s classic track “No Fun”. “[The title] should have been a clue right away,” Costello told Pop. “It shared one word and one letter with a famous song of yours [“No Fun”], but nobody spotted where it was drawing from because nobody expects me to take a cue from you.” To drive the connection home, Costello decided to enlist the Godfather of Punk to put his own spin on the track ...
Top 50 Songs of 2020
The 2020 edition of our Annual Report continues today with our Top 50 Songs of 2020. If you haven’t already, check out our Top 50 Albums of 2020, which came out earlier in the week. Also, be sure to tune in next week as we begin handing out our annual accolades and continue looking back on the strange year that was 2020. Upon being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame some years ago, Tom Waits said, “We love music, but what we really want is for music to love us back.” Believe it or not, it felt like music did that in 2020. For me, anyway. I know that it’s easy to see the world through pandemic goggles right now or strictly through the lens of racial injustice or political turmoil. Tragedy and frustration that keeps piling on can definitely cloud our vision or color our window on t...
Three Classic Eddie Van Halen Guitars Sold For $422,000
“As we were preparing for our annual ‘Icons & Idols: Rock and Roll’ auction lineup, we were stunned to hear the sad news of Eddie Van Halen’s passing,” Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien’s Auctions said in a statement before the sale. “We are honored to include at this event two iconic guitars from his brilliant and blazing career as one of rock’s greatest and most gifted guitar heroes. His instruments join their rightful place among other rock royalty items from Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith and many others.” The auction also featured a black Fender Stratocaster played and smashed by Cobain during Nirvana’s 1994 In Utero tour at a show at the Palais Omnisport de Rennes in Rennes, France, on Feb. 16, 1994 (which went ...
Top 50 Albums of 2020
As we return from Thanksgiving and head into December, our Annual Report will spend the next few weeks looking back upon the strange year that was 2020 and the music, film, and television that came with it. We begin today with our Top 50 Albums of 2020. You’ve heard it from me dozens of times already: 2020 has not been a normal year. And by that, I mean absolutely nothing has been normal. The music world hasn’t been immune, of course. I’ve spent more time cancelling flights and accommodations and trying to get tickets refunded than I actually did watching live music this year. Instragram became a concert venue, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions had no performances, and livestreams (which are pre-taped) seem to be the often-underwhelming future of live music at least for the forseea...
Miley Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts Lovingly Mashes Up Rawk Influences: Review
The Lowdown: For her post-divorce album, Plastic Hearts, Miley Cyrus deploys big synth energy in full ’80s-rawk drag. Over six uneven albums, Cyrus has dabbled across pop genres, but she’s always held a penchant for the era and attitude of mainstream glam, new wave, and hair rock, dropping covers of Joan Jett and Blondie in live sets and covering Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” as early as 2010’s Can’t Be Tamed. Now 28 years old, Cyrus leans fully into these influences, enlisting heroes like Stevie Nicks to have a blast with her while ripping themselves off. Even without her current incarnation’s spunky sneer and platinum shag, Cyrus still has teeth, though this algorithmic “rock” can filter out her bite at times. Still, this might be Cyrus’ most successful pastiche yet. [embedded...
